Sharpen the systems, COOs! 🧠
In this issue, learn how to transform managers into true talent champions with a research-backed playbook.
A new Talent Leadership Model defines four leadership approaches and links them to five practical actions that strengthen talent identification, development, and deployment.
Here’s what stands out this week.
📰 Upcoming in this issue
🧩 How to Foster Talent Management Champions
🧭 Character and Competence Make Leadership Teams Truly Great
🧑💼 Hospitality Hiring Playbook: Talent, Tech, and Outsourcing
📈 Trending news
COOs Stand Up Facility Management Service with a Repeatable Playbook
COOs Equip Managers to Keep Young Talent Connected
Reward Leaders Who Grow People, Not Just Output
🧩 How to Foster Talent Management Champions
Many managers give too little attention to talent strategy. This research introduces a Talent Leadership Model and five interventions to turn team leads into enterprise talent stewards.
Key Takeaways:
🧠 New Model, Clear Lenses: The Talent Leadership Model maps leader behaviors by strategic depth and scope, from bystanders to enterprise champions.
🔎 Diagnose With Evidence: Insights from 147 interviews across 26 multinationals reveal consistent patterns in how organizations identify, develop, retain, and deploy talent.
🔁 Make Mobility Real: Internal talent markets boost engagement and reduce turnover by enabling teams to cooperate across silos and align skills with demand.
🧭 Five Practical Interventions: Executives deploy targeted steps to deepen commitment, align incentives, and make talent work part of leaders’ day jobs.
🧭 Character and Competence Make Leadership Teams Truly Great
This column argues that the best teams balance both pillars. It also highlights common traps, ranging from the ‘capable opportunist’ to the ‘well-intentioned underperformer.’
Key Takeaways:
🔎 Why It Matters Now: Volatile markets and constant scrutiny raise the stakes, so leaders must deliver results while earning trust and protecting reputation.
💠 Character Essentials: Integrity, humility, empathy, and courage guide hard choices, sustain credibility, and prevent short-term wins from causing long-term damage.
🧩 Competence Essentials: Strategic acumen, operational excellence, decision quality, and talent stewardship turn vision into sustained, repeatable performance.
🛠️ How to Build It: Use dual-factor evaluations, trust metrics, balanced development, and non-negotiables that reject results achieved at the expense of values.
🧑💼 Hospitality Hiring Playbook: Talent, Tech, and Outsourcing
Recruitment remains one of hospitality’s toughest challenges. This guide compares in-house hiring, RPO, and temp staffing and shares a practical agency scorecard, as well as AHLA career pathways.
Key Takeaways:
🧭 Inclusive Talent Management: Adopt inclusive practices that provide equal learning, training, promotion, and rewards to build durable hotel talent pipelines.
🤝 RPO and Temp Options: Use recruitment process outsourcing and temporary staffing strategically, supported by engaging training and clear performance targets to maintain guest service quality.
🌱 Grow Career Pathways: Leverage AHLA Foundation programs and apprenticeships to attract youth, promote mobility, and close persistent post-pandemic staffing gaps.
📊 Score Agencies with a Rubric: Evaluate recruiters by services, onboarding speed, support, price, reviews, and industry experience to maximize ROI and fit.
Why It Matters
Organizations succeed when leaders in different areas actively manage skills, movement, and growth.
A clear model with specific actions turns passive managers into proactive talent developers. This leads to greater engagement, reduced turnover, and a more flexible workforce.
Until next edition,
Chloe Rivers
Editor-in-Chief
COO Intelligence
P.S. Interested in sponsoring a future issue? Just reply to this email and I’ll send packages!